Perl for Introductory Programming Courses

While Perl stands for The Practical Extraction and Report Language, even a cursory examination reveals that it is far more extensive and had much more capability than a reporting language.The Perl programming language, developed by Larry Wall, is a flexible and a dynamic scripting language.Perl is referred to as a dynamic language because it uses an interpreter instead of a complier.Perl programming language information is available at www.perl.comand www.activestate.com. Perl runs on most platforms including Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux, and UNIX allowing students to gain development experience using all of the major platforms. Perl comes bundled with Linux distributions and the version of Perl and other details of the installation can be determined from the command line by invoking the $perl -vand $perl -V commands in a Linux or UNIX environment.An excellent way to use Perl on a XP platform is to install the cygwin emulator which can be downloaded from www.cygwin.com.cygwin comes bundled with the latest version of Perl.cygwin operates as if it were a platform in a DOS window while using the XP operating system. Perl is updated and maintained by a development team referred to as the Perl Porters. A vast number of users contribute to CPAN, a public depository of software applications, documentation, binary distributions, and FAQ's. CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl ArchiveNetwork, maintains a website that houses and distributes free Perl materials.No other language provides the user with such extensive support.Perl can be used as a general programming language, a system administration tool, and as a scripting language to perform the functions of utilities such as tr, sed and grep.However, Perl can out-perform these filters in most cases because of the extensive regular expression capabilities it supports.Perl is an excellent teaching language since it so comprehensive and relatively easy to use to demonstrate the basics requirements of a programming language including web-development through Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts and Object Oriented Practices.